Hotlinking Protection

Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a website, some other person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your website. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that can present themselves or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your site.

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud website hosting packages we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't require any coding expertise or any experience with this type of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some point, you could see all of the Internet sites which are protected within the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.

We provide an effective solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The usual way to enable server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives in it. With the tool that you'll find inside the Hepsia CP, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to select the website that you intend to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the required content in it. You can even use this feature for just one folder instead of the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you may disable it with one mouse click through the same exact section of your Control Panel.